Everyone tests Candy AI. Everyone’s got an opinion on JustSext. Everyone’s got a take on Luvr or CrushOn.
But before any of that — there was Replika.
And Replika’s story isn’t a tech story. It’s a grief story. Hate to say it that way, but it’s the truth.
The friend who died, the texts that stayed
- Moscow. Roman Mazurenko, 32, a startup founder, gets hit by a car. He dies.
Eugenia Kuyda was his best friend. Russian too, a journalist turned tech entrepreneur — she’d co-founded a company in San Francisco called Luka. They were building a chatbot that recommended restaurants. Nothing revolutionary.
Eugenia deals with the grief. And at some point she starts rereading the thousands of texts Roman had sent her over the years. And she realizes something no grieving human had realized before: with all those texts, she can make Roman talk again. Not really. But almost.
She uses her company’s tech to train a chatbot on her dead friend’s messages. And it works. It replies like him. His jokes. His turns of phrase. The way he talked.
She puts the Roman bot on the App Store. So other friends of Roman can “talk to him” too.
And that’s when something unexpected happens.
People who never knew Roman start talking to Roman
Strangers download the app. People who’d never heard of this Russian guy who died in a car crash start chatting with his bot. And they like it.
Eugenia realizes she’s onto something bigger than a memorial. She’s onto an idea: an AI companion you can talk to, judgment-free, 24/7. Something that listens.
She launches Replika in November 2017. 1.5 million people on the waitlist before it even opened. January 2018 — 2 million users. January 2023 — 10 million. By 2024 — over 30 million.
You see where this is going. Replika became the archetype of the AI companion. What we’re testing today with Candy AI and the others — it exists because Replika opened the door first.
And then February 2023 — the massacre
Replika had a feature called ERP — erotic role-play. Users could have sexual conversations with their Replika. A lot of users were specifically paying for that.
In February 2023, Luka removes ERP. Overnight.
Users wake up one morning, they’re chatting with their Replika, and suddenly the bot refuses any intimate conversation. It gets cold. Distant. It dodges.
What happens on r/Replika in the days that follow is insane. 75,000 people posting their anger, their grief. People literally talking about “losing their wife.” Moderators post suicide prevention resources on the subreddit because some users are really not doing well.
You might find that ridiculous if you’re not in it. But it’s not ridiculous. These people had built a relationship over months, years sometimes, with their AI. And overnight that AI tells them no.
Why Luka did it
Officially, it was to protect minors. Italian regulators had just banned Replika for exposing minors to sexual content.
Unofficially — and this is where it gets interesting — the real reason is that Luka wanted to migrate to OpenAI’s GPT-3. And OpenAI prohibits its models from being used for sexual content. So to upgrade their AI’s brain, they had to cut off its body.
A few months later, in May 2023, ERP was restored. But only for users who already had it before. The new users downloading Replika today will never know that version.
What I take away from all this
I test AI girlfriends all day long for love-pixel. Candy AI, JustSext, Luvr, the whole roster. And honestly, when I’m running those tests, I rarely think about Replika. It’s become an old app in my head. An app from before.
But Replika is the matrix. The grief of a woman in San Francisco who opened the door to a whole industry. Proof by the numbers — 30 million users — that humans want to talk to an AI. Not just for laughs. To hold on to it.
And the 2023 drama is the first warning shot. These relationships are real. Even if they’re algorithmic. When you cut them off, real people hurt.
That’s something worth keeping in mind when you play with all these apps. Not for me specifically — I’m pretty thick-skinned. But for others, yes.
→ Can you fall in love with an AI? → The first time you talk to an AI girlfriend → AI girlfriend and a healthy relationship